It wasn’t a watershed moment that spurred sheriff’s Commander Dave Myers to run for his department’s top spot.

Instead, he said, after watching the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department – the largest law enforcement agency in the county – miss opportunity after opportunity to be transparent and trustworthy, he found himself asking, “If not me, who, and if not now, when?”

“I saw an opportunity to change the culture (of the department,) but it had to be from the top,” he said.

Myers, a 33-year veteran of the department, is challenging his boss, Sheriff Bill Gore, who has held the position for nearly a decade. The candidate who gets more than half of the vote in June’s primary will serve a four-year term.

The race garnered headlines last year when Myers said that Gore was retaliating against him for running.

In November, Myers said Gore moved him from his office, which was near the offices of other department leaders, to a room on a lower floor that used to be a closet. He was also barred from attending leadership meetings where topics like department strategy and budgets were discussed.

The department in a statement said Myers was relocated so that he could better assist with the new assignment of relocating the department’s crime lab to Kearny Mesa. But he also accused Myers of “weaponizing” information from command staff meetings for campaign purposes, and cited it as one of the reasons he moved the commander.

“Am I passionate about my ideas? Absolutely. I’m absolutely passionate about things that I see could make what we do better,” Myers said. “And when I see the cultural resistance within my organization to that, am I passionate about speaking out against that? Absolutely. And I’m going to continue to do that.”

Gore has said Myers often mischaracterizes information about the department for political gain. He also argued Myers doesn’t have the relationships necessary to continue to advance the county’s goals, nor the ability to be a team player – an important skill as a sheriff.

Myers said his professional history refutes that.

He cited his work helping develop Operation Stonegarden, which focused on detecting and preventing border-related crime in the county, and his efforts to help connect local law enforcement agencies with the department’s regional crime analysis lab, which he helped expand. He also helped institute data-driven policing strategies at the department’s individual substations, he said.

“(Gore has) promoted me three times because of my ability to forge those relationships,” Myers said.

He said establishing trust between the department’s deputies and the community through more transparency and better accountability are high on his list.

That starts with outfitting deputies in jails and courtrooms with body-worn cameras, he said. Currently, only patrol deputies wear the technology. Myers is concerned the department doesn’t want to put cameras in jails because it would reveal how some inmates are mistreated.

“If you do increase transparency and visibility within detention facilities, the public would actually see what’s happening – and it’s that the inmates aren’t actually being cared for,” Myers said.

Gore has touted a number of changes the department implemented in county lockups since news reports revealed local jails had the highest mortality rate among the state’s largest detention facilities over a six-year period.

But Myers criticized the sheriff for waiting to make changes until the problem was brought to the public’s attention, a reactive move Gore is often guilty of, the commander said.

“Change can happen,” Myers said. “But you have to have the leadership that will do it.”

The commander has also been critical of the Gore’s response to unlicensed marijuana dispensaries across the county. He accused his boss of “demonizing” the drug, rather than working with the industry to promote safe and legal access – a move he feels would help decrease illegal shops, allowing more time to focus on opioid addiction.

He also questioned the use of the department’s SWAT team when raiding unlicensed dispensaries – a move that unnecessarily invites confrontation.

Myers said the department needs to do a better job promoting de-escalation. He said he would like to see deputies receive cultural competency and implicit bias training, which involves learning more about diverse communities and recognizing unconscious stereotypes that may influence behavior.

“I think we really need to get back to basics – including knowing who we are and understanding the communities we police better, especially in the county of San Diego, which is extremely diverse,” Myers said.

He said he’s seen first hand how intolerant the department can be.

Myers is one of the only openly gay men in the Sheriff’s Department. Coming out wasn’t easy.

He said he would end up on emergency calls with no backup. Co-workers he thought of as friends stopped socializing with him.

Although he said he often found himself working alone, there were deputies who refused to turn their backs on him, including then-Sheriff Bill Kolender, who pulled Myers into his office and voiced his support, Myers said.